Week 10 Reflection

As this quarter comes to a close, I am grateful to have learned about such a wide range of Chicana artists, especially within the artist presentations in the last few weeks. This class gave a brief overview of many artists, including emerging young artists from social media and artists who work and reside in Los Angeles. The artist visits were particularly interesting, especially hearing how Chicana art has been a critical part in community outreach with groups like Self Help Graphics. 

This class demonstrated how Chicana artists shape their artwork around their shared and individual experiences with traditions like Catholicism and family gender roles. From depicting rituals of the Chicanx community like Carmen Lomas Garza, to making feminist commentary on gender norms within Catholic Chicanx communities like Yolanda M. Lopez, there is such a variety of approaches within Chicana art. I would be interested in learning more about the social and historical context behind more Chicana artists’ work, since the history we covered was limited to a brief 10-week quarter. I think that knowing more of the overall context would supplement the formal investigations of the artwork we have in class. Historical and social context would especially be helpful in learning about public art (i.e. learning more about the public that the art is speaking to). 

Much of the artwork focused on in class was traditional in that it was usually painting, drawing, installation, printmaking, and photography. It would be useful to learn more about Chicana artists working in different mediums, such as digital art, time-based art, or performance. Overall, thank you for a great quarter, and can’t wait to continue learning more about Chicana art and artists in the future!

Week 9

I was interested in the presentation on Sandra Eleta, not only for the photos themselves, but for the question of the ethics of photographing others that her work raises. With stark black and white images of people in their daily lives, Sandra Eleta’s work seems documentary with how she photographs others. While some of her photos appear staged, or at the very least the subject is aware that their photo is being taken, the “neutral” expression of her subjects’ faces makes the work feel documentary. Photos are always different than what you see in real life, and it seems like Sandra Eleta toes the line between embracing the act of photography and the idea of documentation in her photos. To me, it feels like Eleta’s work combines elements of documentary and portraiture photography to create her own photographic language. In addition, taking photos as a Chicana artist of members of minority communities is a risky act in itself. There is always the distinction between making art about a community for the institutional gallery/museum space vs. making art for a community within an institutional galley/museum space. I think the difference is the intention behind the photos and how they were taken, how the artist chooses to display them, and who the audience is. Photography of minority groups can easily fall prey to a white, male gaze, but Sandra Eleta’s work feels more challenging than that because of the purposeful expressions her subjects display. Eleta’s work provides a nuanced look at her subjects and their communities as a whole. 

Week 8 Monica Kim Garza

Out of the artist presentations last week, I identified most with Monica Kim Garza because of her Korean Mexican heritage and her decision to make artwork for her own interest, rather than subscribing to the idea that artists of color have to make work about identity or politics. With many of the Chicana artists we’ve discussed in this class, many of them have at least some political motives or discuss their Chicana identity. I think that this is often expected of Chicana artists, but less so of white male artists. Therefore, I thought it was unique that Monica Kim Garza was able to make work depicting the female body but not in an overtly political way. However, I do think that her way of depicting women—voluptuous, brown-skinned, black haired, nude—does challenge traditional female nudes with predominantly white, bourgeoise women. I also appreciate how she depicts women doing ordinary tasks while nude, and often dancing. This whimsical approach, along with bright colors and bold brushstrokes, brings a unique energy to the figures. I am still trying to understand the mood that her work evokes—is it happy, humorous, dreamy, or something else entirely? Is there subtext to the bright colors and bold brushstrokes, or are they simply just an expression of the artist’s gesture? The humorous titles seem to suggest an edgy, independent, and feminist attitude, but perhaps her paintings are just a reflection of Garza’s uninhibited artistic process. As someone who is Chicana and Korean, it is also interesting to see the different cultural implications Garza’s work exhibits. 

Week 7: Judithe Hernandez

For my presentation, I will discuss the Chicana artist Judithe Hernandez. Born in 1948, Hernandez is known for her public murals in Los Angeles, pastel paintings, and installations. A member of the Chicano artist collective Los Four, Hernandez along with her collective were some of the first Chicanx artists to surpass the barriers of mainstream museums. She has painted murals for activist Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers Union, as well as feminist empowerment murals for the Ramona Gardens Housing Projects in East Los Angeles. I will discuss her pastel work, En Mis Sueños Soy Una Novia (2019), which is part of her larger Juarez series. The piece’s title translates to “in my dreams I am a girlfriend,” and it pictures a seated young woman in a pink dress next to an empty chair. The series focuses on the deaths of women factory workers in the border series Juarez, Mexico, and this piece likely depicts one of the many women sacrificed in these femicides. Filled with symbolism, such as calla lilies, koi fish, cards, and doves, I am hoping to decode the iconographic meaning behind this piece as well as the historical and contemporary context of these deaths at Juarez. Many of these symbols appear in other works by Hernandez, and I am interested in better understanding the significance of their repetition. Overall, I would also like to learn more about the colorful, yet dark dreamscapes (or perhaps, nightmarescapes) that Hernandez often seems to make, which use feminine figures as the primary focus. 

Stencil for week 6

For my stencil, I’m going to incorporate different foods that represent my Chinese American heritage. For example, I’m considering making graphic renditions of foods like xiao long bao (soup dumplings), boba, and dim sum. To me, food is one of the few cultural items that can travel and be passed down throughout generations and around the globe. While I’ve forgotten a lot of the Mandarin I learned growing up, I still eat traditional Chinese food when I’m at home and when I visit my family in China. Food is connected to tradition and ritual; dumpling making is common to celebrate the lunar new year with family, similar to how Carmen Lomas Garza commemorated and depicted tamale making with her family as a ritualistic act. Living in Los Angeles also means having the privilege of accessing wonderfully prepared Chinese cuisines, especially in areas like the San Gabriel Valley. I’ve been interested in the idea of food being “authentic” and what that actually means in the context of cultural appropriation vs. cultural mixing. I think Los Angeles Chinese food, in particular, mixes many cultural influences (e.g. American, Mexican, Japanese, Korean, Italian, the list is endless). But when do we draw the line between cultural food innovation in Chinese American cuisine and cultural appropriation? Does it depend on who’s making it, and where? For example, my parents making dumplings with pork, shrimp, green onions, and zucchini (though cabbage is traditionally used). This is because they knew grad student from China who grew zucchini in their yards upon moving to America in order to feed themselves affordably, and they took what they had (in a rasquache fashion, in my opinion) to build on a long held Chinese tradition. Does the same apply to things like avocado eggrolls or fortune cookies?

Week 5 Chicana Printmaking

When thinking about printmaking as a medium for historically underrepresented artist groups like Chicana artists, I immediately thought of how printmaking relies on both presence and absence. Presence can be represented by the ink that is put on printing plates while absence is removed ink that helps create the image. Similarly, Chicana artists are both present in their rich history of printmaking, yet absent in many historical records or art institutions like museums. Printmaking is also heavily linked to mass communication through printing flyers, books, newspapers, zines, and other materials. Printmaking is associated with these communicative and politicized histories of mass media, such as through propaganda posters. For example, Yolanda M. Lopez’s Who’s The Illegal Alien, Pilgrim? references well-known Uncle Sam posters that were used to recruit citizens during the Vietnam war. Text and the ability to mass produce certain kinds of prints blurs the line between pure mass communication and printmaking in an art context. But when Chicana artists take advantage of these similarities to mass mediated printed material, such as bold/clear images and lines, there is a sense of directness in communicating their message to audience members. I am curious about the distinction between making printed art for select audiences vs. making mass-printed images as a form of protest art. Being able to produce multiple copies of a print is also useful in spreading political messages, and it differentiates Chicana printmaking from more precious processes like painting that only result in one copy. However, artists like Carmen Lomas Garza combine painting and printmaking in artist books. 

Rasquachismo and Domesticana

When thinking about the term rasquachismo, it’s interesting to think how an attitude can be so heavily gendered. From the reading, I got the impression that rasquachismo is largely a Chicano attitude despite the lived realities it responds to being shared by the entire Chicanx community. It is interesting to see how Chicana rasquache, or domesticana, has emerged as a result of women’s restrictions within the Chicanx community. The use of traditionally domestic (and feminine) spheres, such as home altars or dressers, uses the lived reality Chicana women face in the domestic space. I question the purpose of reflecting of femininity and glamour within domesticana art because it risks labeling itself as merely “feminine” art instead of feminist art. However, I can also see how using traditional forms and markers of femininity can both align with and rebel against certain cultural norms. 

It seems that both rasquachismo and domesticana share origins of finding purpose within lived realities to surmount adversity. This lends itself to the seemingly paradoxical idea of rasqachismo being flamboyant yet making do with limited resources. Similarly, domesticana seems to emphasize ephemeral attitudes despite utilizing domestic spaces. It is also interesting how these attitudes are applied not only to artmaking, but also to a way of living within a Chicanx society. Similar attitudes about “making do” can be seen in other cultures as well, and I am interested in rasquachismo’s relationship to other similar cultural attitudes. While rasquachismo and domesticana seem like gendered attitudes, they both share parallels and moments of paradoxicality that complicate them beyond a black and white binary. 

Yolanda M. Lopez's Virgen de Guadalupe series

After reading Karen Mary Davalos’ book Yolanda M. López, I immediately took interest in her Virgen de Guadalupe series. López combines portraits of “ordinary women” (including herself, her mother, and her grandmother) with traditional Mexican Catholic imagery. For example, the radiating blue and gold auras and star-spangled cloaks align the three women with the Virgen de Guadalupe in terms of their clothes. The images also contain symbols like snakes, angels, flowers, and knives to add additional narrative meanings to each piece. Expression also plays a big role in the triptych. For example, Yolanda is smiling and running in an exuberant manner in Portrait of the Artist as the Virgen of Guadalupe. This might suggest that she is happy with her bodily autonomy and identity as a contemporary Chicana woman. Scale is also interesting in this series because they are all the same size. Unlike traditional triptychs in which the center panel is larger, the equal size of the pieces might be commenting on the equal weight of each generation of women. López also uses a similar color palette (e.g. blue background, golden aura, and pink clothes) in all three images. This creates a sense visual unity between the three parts of the series as well. It will be interesting to examine these formal similarities in her work, and the contemporary spin that she has put on traditional Catholic imagery. Within the context of her Chicana background, and the traditional norms held by Mexican Catholic communities, the series can be seen as protest art about the status of women in Chicanx society.

Judithe Hernández

For my presentation, I’ve chosen to focus on the artist Judithe Hernández. Hernández first achieved recognition through her murals but has since become known for her pastel paintings. I decided to choose her for my project because I was fascinated by the complex imagery seen in a lot of her work. I would like to learn more about the symbolism in her iconography, color choice, and painting/artmaking techniques. Her paintings reminded me of Henri Rousseau, and I am curious about the relationship between a Chicana painter like Hernández and a French painter like Rousseau. In addition, some of her paintings have a surrealist look to them, and I wonder how that impacts the types of artistic message she is trying to convey in her work.

In relationship to the reading, I believe that Judith Hernández’s work explores themes like gender and identity politics. For example, it seems that her work discusses women’s roles and how Chicana women must deal with prejudice resulting from their skin color and their gender role as caregivers/wives/mothers. I also find it interesting that Hernández used public art to convey her feminist message before switching to making work that was displayed in galleries and museums. Since the gallery and museum space is historically dominated by white men, it is interesting to see how a Chicana artist like Hernández uses her position to speak to these more private spaces. As an artist making public art in Los Angeles, I’m also excited to explore her work that discusses the Southern California community in relationship to her Chicana identity. 

Chen, Lisa

Hi all! My name is Lisa and I'm a fourth-year art major and film minor. My pronouns are she/her/hers, and I'm from the Chicago suburbs. As an art major, I make a lot of work about being Asian American/Chinese American and about topics like racism/colorism, memory, and “home.” I’m hoping to gain more perspective about Chicana arts through this class in order to better inform my art practice. This is because I consider most, if not all, of my art of to be political. 

As a film minor, I’m really interested in representation of people of color in film, television, and digital media. Being Asian American, I’m happy to see a (slow, yet steady) shift towards more diverse casting and diversity amongst creators. I had the wonderful opportunity to intern at one of the companies that worked on Crazy Rich Asians, and I hope to be a part of a greater movement towards more diversity within entertainment as I pursue a career in film/TV. 

In particular, I’m excited to learn more about Chicana art and artists in order to better understand the history behind topics like the Civil Rights Movement, intersectional feminism, and institutional racism. I hope that this class will better equip me to pursue change and promote diverse representation within film. It’s also so exciting to see the presence of emerging Chicana artists on social media, and I hope that this class will explore how Chicana artists are creating a strong digital presence with their art.

Thanks for reading, and I can’t wait to get to know you all during the rest of this quarter!